these essays to the great romantic poets of the present century is short of what justice demands, I would ask him to remember that he is required by Liberal critics to believe that 'Dryden and Pope are not classics of our poetry.' When two writers who have exercised so powerful an influence on the growth of English metrical literature are thus stripped of their laurels by the stroke of a pen, and without any intelligible reason being assigned, it is perhaps not wonderful that those who reverence and admire them as poets should scrutinise closely the claims of the new deities in whose honour they are deposed. Numerous symptoms, such as the controversy between Mr. Arnold and Mr. Swinburne respecting the merits of Byron and Shelley,1 show that we have not yet emerged from the party struggle that divided the critical world in the beginning of the century. The relative position in the history of English literature that will finally be assigned to the great poets of the 6 1 See Mr. Swinburne's essays on Byron and Wordsworth' in the Nineteenth Century for April and May 1884. present century, has still to be determined by the free conflict of opinion; and, as I have said in my introductory paper, I pretend simply to describe the Liberal Movement from a Conservative point of view. The description itself may be false or inadequate but I venture to think it cannot be put aside as unworthy of examination. |